Its one small step for man, one giant leap for a minifig! Since all of the heavy lifting was done, I thought I'd take a break from technical tasks and do something visual...
...Its pretty satisfying to run a minifig around the environment.
Once the mesh was imported and post processed, it needed a skeleton, rigging and animating along with a third person walk/run controller.
As these are reasonably trivial there isn't much code detail to show off. The skeleton is a hierarchy of about a dozen physics objects. My physics evaluation runs in two passes. The first pass handles integration and the second resolves hierarchy - so its ideal for a simple skeleton with forward kinematics.
The skeleton is rigged in the minifig factory to a cheap one-bone-per-vertex system, which is enough for prototype although I'm itching to make it look nicer.
The animation is a procedural walk/run cycle, and I've stubbed out a keyframe animation player and anim blend tree that I'll fill in later to do some more fancy anims including idle loops, blending between gaits and partial body anims for actions.
The walk run controller is a modified version of the orbit camera from my Mesh Tool application with WASD movement pushed onto the skeleton Root motion. There is no footstep matching so there is some skating, especially on turns. Again, this is good enough for prototype and it'll land on the backlog when it need to gets resolved.
The minifig is parameterised by colour and body element but without painted torsos or heads. I'm probably going to play with the root motion, gravity integrator and collision for a while, and then look at minifig customization more when I roll out a multiplayer server.
Until next time, stay plastic!
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